Name it and it sticks

[yesthattom]

The Republicans know that if something doesn’t get “a name” it doesn’t “stick”. There was 6 months of Clinton-did-something-murmurs but once they all started calling it “MonicaGate”, then it got traction. Creating the name “Snowflake Babies” turned the entire “Republicans want to stop America from curing diseases and force all the good biotech jobs to other countries” into photo ops for newborns that people I wouldn’t trust with a beanie-baby were claiming had been born from embryos that would otherwise have been destroyed.

The liberals (and I say liberals... as in the word with the same root as “liberation”) need to name things better. Here are some things that need names:

• The 100,000 people that are arm-less, leg-less, or hand-less or otherwise have body parts blown up during the Iraq war. Half of them won’t talk to the media because they are afraid of losing their VA benefits. However the other half are ineligible for VA benefits because National Guard troops can’t use the VA (when Dems proposed it, it was voted down by the Republicans for being “too expensive”). That “other half” should be willing to talk to the media.
• A name of vets from the Iraq war that get no VA benefits because they were National Guard members.
• A name for the miscounting of the number of dead Americans in the Iraq war. We just surpassed 3,000 dead, right? Well, it turns out that number doesn’t count the people that die on the airplane to the military hospital in Germany (or while at that hospital). In other words, they under counted by getting wounded onto the airplane as soon as possible. Some estimate there are 5,000 people dead by that standard.
• Unemployment statistics count people getting unemployment benefits, but those run out after 6 months. Therefore the “low unemployment rate” means that very few people have lost their job recently. If you lost your job 6 months and a day, you are out of the statistics. The real unemployment story is much different (and a smart president could use this fact to sustain a long period of many-people-without-jobs as long as they all lost them early in his administration; and then just stayed unemployed for years)
• The people that have jobs without insurance, especially the ones that use expensive emergency room visits for normal treatment... which you and me pay for in taxes. (It would be cheaper to give them insurance and get them primary care)

Can you name more under-counted categories that should be named and/or suggest names for these groups of people?

Comments

Re: not so

[domiobrien.livejournal.com]

Unemployment compensation has to do with CLAIMANTS, NOT unemployment statistics. I'm in NH (and am the state rep for American's Job Bank and am a WRIS and PACIA authorized user-- meaning if I have a legitimate reason I can pull any wage records in the US, US territories, or in some circumstances Canada), but unemployment figures are not dependent on or based on state; they are based on national statistical household samples, which have nothing to do with claiming or qualifying. (Most unemployed people don't qualify for unemployment compensation; you have to have been employed in covered employment for long enough hours/wages on which unemployment insurance was paid by your employer in the base period for that.) What matters is being able, available, and looking for full-time employment and not having any employment in 4 weeks, and no individual counts at all, as is always the case with statistical sampling and interpolation.Doesn't matter if you qualified for unemployment compensation (many people who are still partially employed do; many completely unemployed people don't; or if your UI ran out) What matters if you are able, available, and looking for full-time work, and have had no work in the last 4 weeks. I deal with ELMI (Economic and Labor Market Information) all the time. They don't care at all who qualifies for UI and who doesn't; it's pretty well irrelevant. What matters to them is how many jobs there are, and how many employed people, and how many looking for jobs who don't have one, in which categories at what wages. Domi